A response to a video

I posted the comment below at The Poetry of Science (which is on Discovery News).
This is a theme! Scientists are trying to circle the wagons because of ClimateGate and the general perception that Science has got presentation problems. I think circling the wagons is not a good strategy.

Great poetry is more often not lovely. Do the video again showing how lovely are the ways that Science helps the US help Iraqis and Afghanis. Perhaps adopt the style of Wilfrid Owen's Anthem for doomed Youth.


I worry that this kind of thing doesn't step outside preaching to the converted. Lovely places are lovely without Science telling us how to turn them into something else, whether abstractly, into a theoretical idealization, or concretely, into a parking lot. Do we implicitly say, as Scientists, that there is no beauty without understanding? Worse, is there any untouched beauty?

Abrogating everything beautiful and awesome in the world to Science is an unwarranted pretension. It is also a denial that understanding everything that is ugly or inconsequential is certainly also the subject of Science. When what is ugly seems to be the fault of the technological and industrial use of Science, such denial is culpable, and there are many who cry bitterly at the power of Science to change the world. The double standard seems almost always seen through by everyone except Scientists. Is it as it appears, that we claim credit wherever Science does good but reject blame for enabling others to be uncaring, rapacious, or evil?

There are the usual sincerely meant nods to the humility of Science in this video, but exactly how Science constructively critiques its past successes is subtle enough that this claim looks only ingratiating. That a critique is only allowed to be constructive should be honestly admitted to be self-serving --- without this constraint on critique, Science would presumably soon be dead, right? --- but it's just what Science does, for as long as people see Science to be beneficial. The continued existence of Science as a highly structured pattern of behavior depends on a flow of entropy no less than do the people who depend on Science